The Jazz Scene: Easy Keys, Bass Instincts

Diana Krall

There was a time when singer-pianist Diana Krall (who is also appearing at the Borgata in Atlantic City on Saturday and the Beacon Theater next Friday) was labeled a musical "conservative"—apparently the proper term for an artist whose songs were popular before she was born. Yet Ms. Krall's latest album, "Glad Rag Doll," shows that such definitions are now themselves out-dated. It sounds as if Ms. Krall and producer T-Bone Burnett journeyed back to the beginning of time and landed at that Big Bang moment when all the American idioms—jazz, country, blues, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway—were being invented simultaneously, and not completely independent of one another. There's an overwhelming starkness to the album; far from being a sentimental collection of old favorites, it's practically apocalyptic. Maybe it's actually the ending of time that Ms. Krall has arrived at.

It's been almost 40 years since Peter Allen, the boy from Oz, wrote "Everything Old Is New Again"—so long that Bing Crosby was still around to sing it. It's been so many years, in fact, since Allen told us to "go backwards when forward fails" that the notions of forward and backward no longer seem relevant, and neither do any of the standard ways of thinking about art generationally. Do we even care if anything is "classic," "modern" or "postmodern" anymore? Ms. Krall's "Glad Rag Doll" consists mostly of songs so old that most listeners and reviewers don't even realize they're standards. The title song revels in attitudes about dating and mating that were already archaic when it was published in 1928—the warning to young ladies being that one's marital prospects are compromised by frivolousness ("You're just a pretty toy they like to play with / You're not the type that they grow old and gray with"). Heaven forbid that a man would ever actually marry a woman who's fun to be around. The title also seems to refer to the cover shot: Ms. Krall in vintage lingerie, yet still clad more modestly than most contemporary pop stars.

If "Glad Rag Doll" is a heartfelt ballad with guitar accompaniment, "Sweet Man" exists in a temporal phantom zone. Fully titled "There Ain't No Sweet Man That's Worth the Salt of My Tears," the track uses the classic disc (also 1928) by Paul Whiteman's Orchestra with Bix Beiderbecke and Bing Crosby as a starting point, with an unmistakably similar two-beat underpinning, a slow grind that makes it impossible to pin it down either rhythmically or chronologically. "Prairie Lullaby" is the work of Billy Hill, whose career straddled the old West as well as Broadway. "Lonely Avenue" time-warps forward to the transition from rhythm & blues into rock 'n' roll, into a somber dirge (written by Doc Pomus and a hit for Ray Charles) that's part blues and part death march.

Written by Al Sherman, patriarch of a
Disney
dynasty of songwriters (the Sherman Brothers, composers of "Mary Poppins," et al), "When The Curtain Falls" melodramatically illuminates the contrasts between life on and off the stage—it's both a Tin Pan Alley homage to the iconic speech in "As You Like It" and a retrofitted prototype for "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" on "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." With everything slowed down to herky-jerky movements that suggest circus clowns on acid, the mood is also rather Fellini-esque.

"Glad Rag Doll," right down to that Victoria's Secret cover, is instantly Ms. Krall's best album and proves not so much that "Everything Old Is New Again," but that the concept of newness itself has lately become very old.

The Bad Plus with Bill Frisell

When this out-of-the box pairing got together, one had to wonder: Would the result sound like one half of the equation or the other, or perhaps like something else entirely? The answer is more like the third option: a sound that doesn't quite resemble either parent. On a blindfold test, I would have recognized Bill Frisell's guitar almost immediately, but might have scratched my head as to the identity of the piano (Ethan Iverson), bass (Reid Anderson) and drums (Dave King). The combination has yet to record or to play in New York, but online videos of the foursome from last August at the Newport Jazz Festival showcase much more of the rhythmically ambiguous sound one associates with Mr. Frisell. Whatever the case, it's a team-up not to be missed.

ENLARGE

Charnett Moffett
Alan Nahigian

Charnett Moffett

Joe's Pub 425 Lafayette St., (212) 539-8778 Sunday

The bassist Jay Leonhart tells a joke about an older married couple who stopped talking to each other because they'd run out of things to say—except during bass solos, when boredom compelled them to talk. Charnett Moffett, like Mr. Leonhart, proves that bass improvisations don't have to be boring, it's just that bandleaders (even when they're bassists themselves) rarely award the bass the glamour spot of playing the melody. On "The Bridge," a new album of solo bass performances, Mr. Moffett and his string bass exalt such beloved tunes as "Round Midnight," "Caravan" and "Eleanor Rigby." His playing here (capping a weeklong bassathon of shows at seven different clubs) suggests that pianists and guitarists should stop acting as if they have a monopoly on unaccompanied solos that engage and entertain an audience.

ENLARGE

JD Allen
Alan Nahigian

Cuttin' Up: Lew Tabackin & JD Allen

If the local media had always given the beloved Lenox Lounge the kind of coverage it's gotten since it closed down recently, the place might never have been in danger. Now, maybe, we should focus that energy on the venues that are still bringing the best musicians back to Harlem, like Ginny's. The Lenox Avenue restaurant is attracting crowds not only with an inspired concept for programming—a series of two-sax battles, which next week brings Sherman Irby and Antonio Hart on dueling altos—but with the cuisine of Marcus Samuelsson. The series launches with a particularly challenging tenor competition: Mr. Tabackin is one of Sonny Rollins's most formidable disciples, while Mr. Allen is perhaps the most rigidly disciplined and hardest-swinging "free" player out there.

Bibi Ferreira

Alice Tully Hall 1941 Broadway, (212) 671-4050 Sunday

Calling the 90-year-old Ms. Ferreira a living legend in Latin America would be an understatement. She's kind of the combined Carol Channing and Charles Aznavour of Brazil, and on Sunday she's making her New York debut. Ms. Ferreira has been on the stage since she was less than a month old, in 1922, and in the 1960s she was the number one leading lady entrusted with bringing Broadway blockbusters to Rio, such as "Hello, Dolly," "Man of La Mancha," and "Minha Querida Dama" (aka "My Fair Lady"). More recently, she's been one the world's great caretakers of the legacy of Edith Piaf, (as on her album, "Bibi Canta Piaf"), but her specialty is the tangos, choros and "bossas nova" of her native South America, which she sings better than anybody.

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